This morning at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit , we celebrated SQL Server 2014’s strong momentum and introduced new services that further expand Microsoft’s big data platform. We announced a major update coming to...

Guest Blogger: Aaron Bertrand
Aaron is a senior consultant for SQL Sentry , providers of the free Plan Explorer, as well as performance monitoring and event management software for SQL Server. He has been blogging at sqlblog.com since 2006, focusing...

With the release of SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) and the commercial release of Visual Studio 2013, we are excited to announce new preview releases of SQL Server Data Tools to support both database and business intelligence projects...

Microsoft is pleased to announce the release of SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 . The Service Pack is available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. As part of our continued commitment to software excellence for our customers, this upgrade is...

FEATURED POST BY: Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President, The Data Platform Group, Microsoft Corporation
If you follow Microsoft’s data platform work, you have probably observed some changes over the last year or so in our product approach...

I am pleased to announce previews of new NoSQL database and search services and the evolution of our Hadoop-based service. Available as previews today are Azure DocumentDB, a fully-managed transactional NoSQL document database-as-a-service, and Azure...

This is one of the best times to be working in SQL Server. I just came from the O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World conference this week, where there was a great dialog about advances in data management techniques. We’re already the world’s...

Building data-intensive applications in emerging cloud computing environments is fundamentally different and more exciting. The levels of scale, reliability, and performance are as challenging as anything we have previously seen. Databases are still prevalent...

Today we are pleased to announce a new offering that builds on our cloud-first data platform -- Power BI for Office 365. Unveiled this morning by Satya Nadella, President of the Server and Tools Business, during his keynote at our annual Worldwide Partner...

Earlier today, Microsoft hosted a customer event in San Francisco where I joined CEO Satya Nadella and COO Kevin Turner to share our perspective on the role of data in business. Satya outlined his vision of a platform built for an era of ambient intelligence...

This has been a really exciting week for the Microsoft data platform . On Monday, we announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365 . This morning, we announced that support for Hadoop 2.2 clusters is now in preview for Windows Azure HDInsight...

In a blog post earlier this year on “ The coming database in-memory tipping point ”, I mentioned that Microsoft was working on several in-memory database technologies. At the SQL PASS conference this week, Microsoft unveiled a new in-memory...

With the release of SQL Server 2014 CTP2 , you can now significantly boost the performance of your OLTP workloads in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. By creating a new VM with our preloaded image of SQL Server 2014 CTP2 on Windows Server 2012 R2 , or installing...

Today we’re pleased to announce the addition of significant new features to the Power BI for Office 365 preview, including natural language search with Q&A and improved experiences in two preview add-ins for Excel with 3D mapping visualizations...

Yesterday we talked about how we are delivering real-time performance to customers in every part of the platform. I’m excited to announce another example of where we are delivering this to customers in conjunction with one of our partners. Microsoft...

At the Accelerate your Insights event last week, Satya Nadella introduced the new Microsoft Analytics Platform System (APS) as Microsoft’s solution for delivering “Big Data in a box.” APS is an evolution of our SQL Server Parallel Data...

In this overview and demo, we will show you what sentiment analysis is and how to build a quick mashup that combines real-time access to multiple data sources using tools from Microsoft.
Sentiment analysis is one of the hottest topics in the Big Data...

Over the last two years , Microsoft has been sharing our progress in Big Data by working to bring Hadoop to the masses through the simplicity and manageability of Windows and Azure. In 2012, Microsoft communicated our expanded partnership with Hortonworks...

AlwaysOn encompasses the SQL Server solutions for mission-critical high availability and disaster recovery. Two solutions were included under the AlwaysOn umbrella in SQL Server 2012: Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances . Each solution...